After a long and tiring leak and tease from London to US, and China, now the PlayStation Phone finally gets unveiled during Sony’s event in Tokyo, Japan. However, the phone will not carry the PlayStation title, but instead with the Xperia sub-brand slapped at the back of the phone, with some PlayStation moniker hanging around. Not sure whether it’s a wise decision to brand the phone under Xperia, but Sony Ericsson probably wants it to go parallel with the Arc together.

The Xperia Play is essentially a 4-inch multitouch Android phone with Gingerbread preloaded, and some PlayStation UI fused inside the OS. Just like the PSP Go, sliding out the phone through landscape will reveal the controller side. The 4-inch multitouch screen has an 854×480 LCD screen, which is the same as the X10, but is powered by the Bravia engine like the Xperia Arc for better image quality.

Processor wise, it’s still unconfirmed, as few sides have also been struggling to identify the chips used. Sony has also failed to mention about it. Thus far, it’s believed to be a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 coped with the Adreno 205 GPU and a norm 512MB of RAM, though it’s been mentioned before that the MSM8655 is capable of reaching 1.2GHz speed. Thus far reviews have shown results of 59fps on Neocore, 43fps on the NenaMark, and 1,689 on Quadrant, which is quite impressive. This put the Xperia Play neck to neck with the LG Star that is packed with the Tegra 2.

At the bottom are four shiny Android soft keys below the screen – back, menu, home, and search. Frankly I’d prefer them to be touch sensitive type, not physical buttons. The gamepad is underneath the screen. Just push the screen upwards in landscape mode to about half way and the spring mechanism will work itself all the way up. There you’ll see the PlayStation DualShock-style gamepad like what we’ve seen in the leaked photos. There’s only one pair of shoulder buttons instead of two, the all-familiar D-pad (which also works on Android). PSP Go owners should be familiar with these layouts.

Sony Ericsson has loaded the ‘Play’ with their own PlayStation Pocket app, which will be able to handle all your downloaded games, presumably downloaded from a unique ‘PlayStation’ market place. The ‘Play’ comes with a 5-Megapixel camera instead of the Arc’s 8-Megapixel. We can see clearly how SE wants to market this product. Early prototypes show that there’s no 720P video recording support, but this could come in the final product’s firmware. The ‘Play’ can easily handle 720P H.264 contents, but their AVC profiles cannot exceed level 3.1. AVI and MKV are not natively recognized. The ‘Play’ comes with a very standard 1.500mAh battery, so don’t expect long hours of gaming. There’s microSD card slot.

Sony Ericsson hasn’t announced the availability and the price, so probably that’ll be answered at MWC in March.

SOURCE via Engadget